Elon: Code is brittle. Need a complete rewrite
twitter.com
twitter.com
One who has enough experience to see flaws in an existing (or "legacy") system and feel they could do better if they just rewrote it all from scratch, but not enough experience (or too much hubris) to know how well that does or does not go in practice.
He may be right, of course. I'm just pattern matching on what he sounds like...
And it should be noted that he's responding to another tech billionaire who fancies himself as an oracle as well. This is like throwing around verbal spars at the water cooler at the local squash club.
Wealth? There's like 0-3 others. So what? Lottery winners show no more skill than anyone else.
Visibility? Well, you've got Zuck (no what's-her-face in hiding from Meta anymore), not Jack Dorsey anymore, no Sergey or Larry or Bill or Steve... I can't think of anyone outside of tech. Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, they're more visible and seem to have a hard time keeping things together, especially since end of Bush, but they didn't fire half their workforce and make their operations break down frequently. I give Clinton and Obama decent marks for leaving the economy in a good shape for their successors to screw up. Jimmy Carter had great success in his endeavors.
Eptitude? I think the ept have avoided getting snared in awful deals like Elon stuck his finger into.
I think we're at the bottom of the second inning of this game of Twitter-ball. Let's see how it goes from here now that the team is down to a bare roster.
I’m of the opposite opinion. At this stage, he has heard the counter arguments. He is smart enough to know what he is doing.
I genuinely think he is making these statements to wind us up, though I don’t guess as to why.
You could make the argument that "it shouldn't take as many people as it did" i.e. the code quality "is bad"
Or you could say "this is hard and takes people to make sure it works."
You will always find that "the code is brittle" as you get rid of more and more people if your assumption is that the service should run with no oversight and no people
In theory we could make software that lasts for decades, given some languages have been around for that long. Even if the programming languages changed, software could be abstracted and worked on a level that transcends technical specs. The problem is that it is not viable for large organizations with hundreds of engineers that are constantly rotating and changing focus. Business is too short-term oriented to care for any benefits of long-term engineering. I'm not saying it's good or bad, and maybe this changes as we move further and further into the information age.
That's when you've got something small that works and the rewrite is a bloated mess of every feature you could dream of.
This is the case where you've got an accumulation of over a decade of technical debt and Chesterton's Fences and someone who has no idea why the code is the way that it is inherits it and decides to rewrite it, and not knowing which constraints are necessary and which aren't they throw away most of them and find out the hard way that the problem isn't actually that simple.
It is almost the inverse of the second system syndrome.
But it is abundantly clear that Elon doesn't even know how to have this conversation.
A service small enough that a team or engineer can rewrite it in a cycle/sprint.
When it’s bigger than that, you have the compounding effects of other systems that interact with each other.
"Why are there so many small services running? Surely we can shut down / delete/ merge together a bunch of them to clean things up"
I'm pretty sure Elon has also hit this fallacy during his tenure at Twitter.
It’s such a Weird fallacy since I feel like the entire point of Microservces is that there’s an inherit reason they’re microservices in the first place.
If you don’t know why, you investigate why. It feels far easier to make a monolith than a microservice.
https://engineering.fb.com/2020/03/02/data-infrastructure/me...
Somehow we would need to track to two code bases for a decade afterwards and see which was the better choice.
A small wiring change had massive ramifications. The car construction is extremely brittle for no good reason.
Will ultimately need a complete redesign.
I think Elmo is more or less sociopathic at this point, but I think he’s more correct about Twitter than people think, just not in the way people think. I think it can be profitable still. He’ll overcome his brand damage eventually.